Posted on 03/05/2020 1:33:11 PM PST by algore
SETI@home is shutting down. In an announcement posted yesterday, the project stated that they will no longer send data to SETI@home clients starting on March 31st, 2020 as they have reached a "point of diminishing returns" and have analyzed all the data that they need.
Don’t forget your towel.
Did ET call home yet?
For many yrs I was thinking why not donate 12 hours from a supercomputer and it’ll compute out all the solutions?
So, still nothing out there....
Well hell, I’ve had it running one at least one PC since 1999. Sometimes multiple computers at home and work, until companies really started cracking down on their firewalls. (It’s hard to get a site white-listed without reason nowadays. Listening for little green men usually doesn’t pass muster, even if you’re in IT, was well.) Currently I run it on a quad-core Acer laptop and - wait for it - a Dell Latitude Pentium III C610 running XP SP3 with 512 MB of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive. LOL SETI@home was one of the main reasons why I’ve kept that tin lizzy running for almost 20 years. It’ll be good for nothing else but Fuji Golf and a few 32 bit screensavers and games now. But, it’s like an old pair of jeans in the closet with holes in the pockets and paint stains on them - you know you should get rid of them, but you just can’t bring yourself to part with them. Looks like it’s time to download copies of my certs and stats, then find some good abandonware to install. Might still be robust enough to play Wolfenstein 3D on.
Get four old Pentium computers and strap them together into a clustered Beowulf mainframe. One good visit to a flea market, a free Linux OS, an small Ethernet switch, some cables, and you’re golden. It’s a poor man’s supercomputer.
We are alone. Because we are being shunned by the truly intelligent beings.
“I heard Buttiefag was part of their anal probe program and he actually liked it..”
My oldest is a KVM’d Athlon 1200 mobo. I think the BIOS says 2003.
It did its share of SETI at one time.
I run AOE II, a couple of other games, and use it to mostly peruse USENET.
Oh, and Word 97 for printing envelopes and labels.
I have a 20 yo Brother laser printer shared off of it.
Answer is? There are no extra-terrestrial aliens out there, that we could possibly communicate with.
I’m quite surprised. Certainly this shutdown can’t be because enough people realized the impossibility of an intelligible signal traveling across interstellar distances.
Wow. I used to have a networked computer room in my house, until a lightning strike fried everything. Including the house. I used that room to do HW/SW repair for a client my employer (at the time) contracted out to. My workload was so heavy, I used to work on their company PCs in there while dinner was cooking. Glad nothing of theirs was on the bench when the fire hit. I had an HP Laserjet 4 Plus as my main printer; I bought it from someone for $35, and they swore it was dead. Funny how a new fuser can kickstart those things. Ha. The first replacement PC I bought before we bought this house is a dual core eMachine with 4 GB of DDR2. The drive went bye-bye and it’s been sitting here dormant under my desk for almost two years. I even went to far as to get a factory-refurb 500 GB SATA drive, and it’s still sitting on top in the PC caddy. I finally got a small fire lit under me and bought a two port KVM switch. As soon as I pick up or order a four port passive hub, I’m getting everything hooked up and installing Linux Mint on the tower. I have so many copies of OS and software CD’s I’ve picked up in my travels, it’s like a small library. I think I even still have an old Compaq here somewhere that’s a 486 running Windows for Workgroups (!). Heaven knows if it’ll boot back up, but it did at one point. The crawlspace under the house is like a Smithsonian Museum of Ancient Technology.
Just after they switch off the equipment an alien will phone and say ‘klaatu barada nikto’ which means ‘Why did you hang up?’
Search “active seti controversy.” They pretty much just went ahead and started tight beaming to various points in the sky. I guess some prominent members resigned over it.
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